Reassessing McChrystal
McChrystal eyes securing Kandahar – CNN.com
The top U.S. general in Afghanistan vowed that coalition forces “are absolutely going to secure Kandahar,” as security efforts expand in the country’s south.
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The push to secure Kandahar from what McChrystal calls a “menacing Taliban presence” is part of a larger counterinsurgency effort in the country’s south, started last month in Marjah in southern Helmand province.Long a bastion of pro-Taliban sentiment and awash with the opium used to fund the insurgency, the Marjah region has been known as the heroin breadbasket of Afghanistan and as a place where the Taliban had set up a shadow government.
I seem to have underestimated Gen. McChrystal. I thought he really had bought into the whole population-centric COIN model. But what he is doing right now is actually pursuing what seems to be a much more strategically sound concept. Instead of clear-hold-build for key population centers, he seems to be adopting a strategy that is focused on denying victory to the insurgents by sequentially displacing them from their strongholds. He is, in short, undermining THEIR clear-hold-build strategy.
Now, if that is all he is doing, it is obviously doomed to failure since all this does is set up a whack-a-mole dynamic, but if coupled with a robust negotiation effort — one that reaches up to relatively senior levels — you create the possibility for significant defections from the insurgency. And while I would be happy to defer to others with more ground knowledge, my impression of Afghan society is that endemic warfare at least over the past 30 years has made this sort of defection a common and acceptable behavior.
Though he probably won’t say it out of fear of offending to power pop-centric COIN lobby in the United States, it looks to me increasingly as if McChrystal has adopted a clear enemy-centric COIN model. And if that is the case, the force ratios — flawed as they are in any case — become largely irrelevant.
